So you may be wondering why it has taken me so long to post the results of the Justice and Mercy survey. The truth is, the results themselves were uninteresting. Negative results all round, almost astonishingly so. There was no association between any of the demographic factors and mercy. There was no association between your … Continue reading Results of the Justice & Mercy Survey

Details have been changed to protect all involved. I I want to protest against a tendency I have seen, in some parts of the left, to deny that sometimes mental illness diminishes responsibility for very serious crimes. This tendency is well intentioned. The intention is to deny hurtful and dangerous stereotypes that mentally ill people … Continue reading Violence, mental illness and culpability- a left-wing perspective

Let's suppose a few things. First of all let's suppose that you care about other people. Let's quantify that care and say that you care about them, on average, one quarter as much as you care about yourself. This is, I think, a reasonable lower bound on how much most people would want to care, … Continue reading Should you vote?

Sam and Finley Finley loves Sam and Sam loves Finley. Sam hits their head, losing all of their autobiographical memory. However their skills and personality remain as they were. The usual question at this juncture is were you Finley, would you still love Sam? The idea being that if you answer yes, it follows that … Continue reading New thought experiments for the backyard metaphysician to try at home

We are rarely one step from disaster. Most really awful outcomes require at least two things to go wrong. Often, but not always those two things are ill-will and stupidity. Hanlon's razor says that you should never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence. It's not a bad way to think, but … Continue reading Try to always be kind because you never know when you’re incompetent

GPT-3 is a powerful (170 Billion parameter) language model that can be used to continue just about any piece of text. A version of it is avaliable through a program called AI dungeon. I applied it to numerous samples of Sufjan Stephen's lyrics, in a project I call "ComesWithASwordBOT". What follows is (what are in … Continue reading The best of ComesWithASwordBOT- AI generated continuations of Sufjan lyrics

The bits in italics are original Sufjan, the plain text is a computer generated continuation Written by GPT-3 through the Dungeon AI program Please let me know which of these verses you like and which you don't. Decatur   Sangamon River it overflowed It caused a mudslide on the banks of the operator Civil War … Continue reading ComesWithASword-BOT: GPT-3 continues the lyrics of Sufjan Stephens: First pass

How a bunch of songs that weren’t written by Sufjan Stevens would be interpreted if Sufjan wrote them (With apologies to JT, Kelis, DJ Alligator & Sufjan) SexyBack It’s significant that at the very beginning the narrator refers to his romantic competitors as boys (“them other boys don’t know how to act”). Sufjan has always … Continue reading How a bunch of songs that weren’t written by Sufjan Stevens would be interpreted if Sufjan wrote them